In this paper, we argue that differences in the cost structure across sectors play an important role in the decision of firms to adjust their prices. We develop a menu cost model of pricing in which retail firms intermediate trade between producers and consumers. An important facet of our...

Standard sticky information pricing models successfully capture the sluggish movement of aggregate prices in response to monetary policy shocks but fail at matching the magnitude and frequency of price changes at the micro level. This paper shows that in a setting where firms choose when to...

We present a model in which temporary shocks can permanently scar the economy's productive capacity. Unemployed workers lose skill and are expensive to retrain, generating multiple steady state unemployment rates. Large temporary shocks push the economy into a liquidity trap, generating...

We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt in a low interest rate environment. Higher risk increases the demand for safe assets, lowering the natural rate of interest below zero, constraining monetary policy at the zero lower bound,...

This paper measures the effect of monetary tightening in key advanced economies on net capital flows and exchange rates around the world. Measuring this effect is complicated by the fact that the domestic monetary policies of affected economies respond endogenously to the foreign tightening...

We investigate how bank migration across state lines over the last quarter century has affected the size and covariance of business fluctuations within states. Starting with a two-state version of the unit banking model in Holmstrom and Triocole (1997), we conclude that the theoretical effect of...

The cyclicality of markups is crucial to understanding the propagation of shocks and the size of multipliers. I show that the degree of inertia in the response of output to shocks can reverse the cyclicality of markups within implicit collusion and customer-base models. In both classes of...

I show that parity realignments alone do not suffice to ensure the long-run sustainability of an exchange rate target zone with imperfect credibility due to the gambler's ruin problem. However, low credibility and frequent realignments can destabilize the exchange rate

We investigate the effects of Central Bank interventions which are designed to smooth exchange rate volatility but are not aimed at a particular trend level. We present a model in which the intervention flow is a non-linear mapping of the market order flow. Simulations show that small daily...

I show that the prices of the internationally traded crypto-currency bitcoin can be used to estimate a currency's unofficial exchange rate and capital controls at a daily interval. Two important bitcoin features are documented: (1) Bitcoin-based exchange rates approximate the behavior, but not...